In his exceptionally interesting essay 'Can Socialists Be Happy?', George Orwell begins with some thoughts about Dickens and Christmas and goes on to discuss how unappealing visions of utopia and Heaven tend to be. This forms the main body of the essay and leads him towards the tentative conclusion, 'It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast.' The whole is well worth reading.
But I want to discuss something Orwell says much more briefly after arriving at the above conclusion. It's this:
I suggest that the real objective of Socialism is not happiness... The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though it is not usually said, or not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue.
Now, a world with more brotherly, and sisterly, love is certainly something to be desired (as, equally, is one with more happiness than has so far been possible); but I think Orwell was wrong, nonetheless, to characterize the central objective of socialism in the way he does here. The main objective of socialism is egalitarian justice, and while establishing it, should this be possible, would depend on a widespread change of attitudes, that is something else than universal love. I shall offer two reasons for disagreeing with Orwell's characterization.
First, universal brotherly and sisterly love is not a necessary condition of socialism. We know even from non-socialist experience that people don't have to love one another to accept that others than themselves have rights to be treated with dignity, have basic human rights that must not be violated, are entitled to freedom of speech and to vote and so forth. You don't have to be everyone's friend, much less feel towards them as a loved brother or sister, to recognize the universality of such entitlements. Socialism, therefore, is essentially about the principles, procedures and institutions that are to prevail and not about the generalizing of love.
Second, it is fortunate that this should be so, since on the basis of all that we currently know, the expectation of a love that has become universal is exorbitant. Most of us, I would be willing to bet, can think of people whom we certainly do not love, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the nature of the social and economic order; and in any large society that is remotely conceivable there will, for just about anyone, be large numbers of others whom they don't love, even if they harbour no feelings of animosity towards them. It might just be people that are distant from us, or who have values that we find unattractive or repellent, or who have behaved in ways with which we cannot reconcile ourselves.
I now consider two possible counter-arguments to what I've said - one for each of those two arguments.
It might be urged in Orwell's defence that it was the principle of social harmony that he was really getting at, rather than its emotional underpinning. Perhaps so. But it remains the case that the way he describes the 'real objective' of socialism is misleading. What socialists aim at is a set of institutions and relationships; the attitudes needed to sustain these need not be as demanding as brotherly and sisterly love.
And it might be urged, also, that though it is true that most of us do not currently love everyone, this doesn't necessarily mean that a new human type (who would emerge in the changed environment of a socialist society) could not love everyone. The short answer to that is: yeah, right. The longer answer is: we have no evidence from the long history of humankind that such a development is likely; rather the opposite. If you're willing to assume away the problems of interhuman friction, indifference, hostility, etc, simply on the basis that all of this might be changeable, why not just assume away every kind of problem that stands in the way of creating a better world, without the need of looking for practical solutions? How to coordinate multiple decisions and a mass of information compatibly with egalitarian social structures? Oh, we'll come up with something. How to reconcile equality of opportunity in the second and third (etc) generations with inequality of outcomes in the first and second? There's bound to be a way. And so on
On the basis of everything we know, love has its limits and they fall far short of embracing the totality of humankind. Socialists need objectives that look reachable in the light of some serious evidence.
